Ben Franklin's World

In December 1777, Continental Army Colonel David Henley climbed off his horse to discipline a drunk British prisoner of war who was screaming epithets about Americans and vowing to fight for his king. Henley struck the prisoner, one of 6,000 in his care, with his sword.
The wound was minor, but Major General John Burgoyne cited this incident when he accused Henley of plotting to murder British prisoners of war. Burgoyne demanded a formal court-martial.
Professor Timothy Breen joins us to examine Henley’s trial with details from his new book, The American Revolution on Trial. Timothy asks a question most grand narratives of the American Revolution skip past: What did it actually feel like, in real towns among real people, to stop being British? What did it mean to be American?
Timothy’s Book
Show notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/451
EPISODE OUTLINE
00:00:00 Introduction
00:04:43 The 250th Anniversary and the Limits of Grand Narratives
00:09:31 How Timothy Found the Henley Court-Martial Transcript
00:13:26 Major General John Burgoyne and Aristocratic Privilege
00:23:00 Competing Ideas of Honor During the Revolution
00:29:53 Inside the Cambridge Prisoner of War Camps
00:36:23 The Two Incidents that Led to the Court-Martial
00:45:25 The Verdict and What Happened Next for Henley and Burgoyne
00:48:37 How Early Americans Judged the Revolution and the New Nation
00:53:41 What Happened to the British and German POWs in Cambridge
RECOMMENDED NEXT EPISODES
🎧 Episode 048: Dangerous Guests: Enemy Captives During the War for Independence
🎧 Episode 122: The Men Who Lost America
🎧 Episode 374: The American Revolutionary War in the West
🎧 Episode 414: Robert Newburgh’s Trials: Queerness & Reputation in Revolutionary America
🎧 Episode 434: The Frank Brothers: Freeborn Black Soldiers in the American Revolution
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What caused the American Revolution?
Taxation without representation? Colonies that had outgrown their dependence on the British Empire? Or something harder to see: a quarrel about power itself and about what a government may rightly do to the people it governs?
In 1967, Bernard Bailyn published The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, a book he built out of more than 400 pamphlets, and one historians have been arguing with ever since.
In this revisited conversation from Episode 152, Professor Bailyn explains why he never accepted a purely economic explanation for the Revolution, where the revolutionaries' ideas actually came from, and why colonists rationally concluded that the British government was concealing a conspiracy against their liberties.
Bernard Bailyn’s Wikipedia Page | Book |
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/152
RECOMMENDED NEXT EPISODES
🎧 Episode 294: 1774: The Long Year of American Revolution
🎧 Episode 311: Religion and the American Revolution
🎧 Episode 307: History and the American Revolution
🎧 Episode 325: Everyday People of the American Revolution
🎧 Episode 407: Patrick Henry
🎧 Episode 434: The Frank Borthers: Freeborn Black Soldiers in the American Revolution
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In December 1776, a Delaware Chief named White Eyes stood before the Second Continental Congress. He had not come to declare himself a revolutionary, nor had he come to pledge his loyalty to King George III. White Eyes came to test a promise.
What does the American Revolution look like to people for whom independence was never a question? For the Delaware, also known as the Lenape, the War for Independence raised older and harder questions:
Whose word could be trusted? What choices can we make about whether to fight, stay neutral, or flee that might let our community remain itself on the land we know?
Jeremy Johnson, Cultural Education Director for the Delaware Tribe of Indians, traces Lenape and Delaware history from long before European contact through the American Revolution. He also introduces us to the September 1778 Treaty of Fort Pitt, the first treaty the United States made with a Native Nation and which promised a 14th Native state.
Delaware Tribe of Indians’ Website
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/450
EPISODE OUTLINE
00:00:00 Introduction
00:02:35 The Lenape Experience of the American Revolution
00:07:56 Lenape History and Indigenous Origin Stories
00:10:52 Diplomacy in Lenape Traditions
00:15:32 Evolution of Lenape Diplomacy Through European Contact
00:20:00 The Walking Purchase of 1737
00:24:55 Lenape Experiences of the Seven Years' War
00:32:13 Lenape Participation in Pontiac's Rebellion
00:37:17 The Delaware and the American Revolution
00:46:32 Negotiating the Treaty of Fort Pitt
00:50:16 The Hope for Delaware Sovereignty
00:52:53 The Delaware People & America's 250th
01:00:02 Time Warp
01:02:41 Resources
RECOMMENDED NEXT EPISODES
🎧 Episode 163: The American Revolution in North America
🎧 Episode 264: The Treaty of Canandaigua
🎧 Episode 286: Elections in Early America: Native Sovereignty
🎧 Episode 323: American Expansion and the Political Economy of Plunder
🎧 Episode 397: Native Nations: A Millennium in North America
🎧 Episode 449: Stealing America: Indigenous Enslavement & the American Revolution
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*Book links are affiliate links. Every purchase supports the podcast.

In 1723, the College of William & Mary opened the Brafferton building, a permanent home for an Indian School the college had been chartered to run and struggled to fill for its first 30 years. The premise of the Brafferton: take Native boys and strategically teach them in ways that would make them more useful to the British Empire.
So what actually happened inside the Brafferton Indian School?
In this revisited episode, the first of a two-part series, our three guests investigate why the Brafferton School existed, how the English filled Brafferton with students even as Native families refused to send their children, and what the Indigenous students did with the knowledge the English taught them.
We’ll also explore how a school built on a colonial college campus during the reign of King George I connected to schools like the Carlisle School, which were still separating Indigenous children from their families in the 1950s.
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/367
RECOMMENDED NEXT EPISODES:
🎧 Episode 158: The Revolutionaries' Army
🎧 Episode 290: The World of the Wampanoag, Pt. 1
🎧 Episode 291: The World of the Wampanoag, Pt. 2
🎧 Episode 353: Women and the Making of Catawba Identity
🎧 Episode 368: The Brafferton Indian School, Part 2: Legacies
🎧 Episode 449: Stealing America
SUPPORT OUR WORK
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More than half a million Indigenous people were enslaved within the present-day borders of the United States.
Historian Linford Fisher spent fifteen years in archives across North America, the Caribbean, and Britain to investigate this forgotten history. What he found was not a second story running alongside African slavery. It was something different in kind. Europeans and early Americans enslaved people who lived on land they intended to possess. This practice made slavery a tool of dispossession.
The American Revolution is where this process accelerated. Lin and Lorén Spears, a Narragansett tribal citizen and the executive director of the Tomaquag Museum, trace how the Revolution opened space for captive raiding on the western frontier, how Native nations weighed which side to take during the war, and how their Stolen Relations digital project is recovering the names of the Natives early Americans enslaved.
Lin’s Website | Book |

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/449

EPISODE OUTLINE
00:00:00 Introduction
00:01:23 The Declaration's Overlooked Grievance Against Indigenous People
00:02:29 The Other Revolutionary War
00:03:20 Investigating the Hidden History of Indigenous Enslavement
00:07:07 Uncovering the Scale of Indigenous Enslavement
00:13:43 Building Stolen Relations Through Archival and Tribal Collaboration
00:20:51 Decolonizing Archival Records
00:30:40 Connection Between Indigenous Enslavement & Land Dispossession
00:33:53 How Native Nations Navigated the American Revolution
00:37:16 From Colonial Experimentation to Revolutionary Expansion
00:41:15 How the American Revolution Expanded Indigenous Slavery
00:45:20 How Indigenous Nations Weighed Neutrality, Alliance, & Survival
00:52:51 The Declaration of Independence's Impact on Indigenous Communities
01:01:10 The Treaty of Paris, 1783 and the Continuation of Indigenous Dispossession
01:03:51 The Uncertain End of Indigenous Enslavement
01:11:59 Commemorating the American Revolution Through Indigenous History
01:24:36 Revolution to Freedom Through Indigenous Sovereignty

RECOMMENDED NEXT EPISODES
🎧 Episode 163: The American Revolution in North America
🎧 Episode 264: The Treaty of Canadaigua
🎧 Episode 323: American Expansion & the Political Economy of Plunder
🎧 Episode 367: The Brafferton Indian School, Part 1
🎧 Episode 368: The Brafferton Indian School, Part 2
🎧 Episode 406: Threads of Power

SUPPORT OUR WORK
🎁 Make a Donation to Ben Franklin’s World

REQUEST A TOPIC
📨 Topic Request Form
📫 liz@benfranklinsworld.com

WHEN YOU'RE READY
🗞️ BFW Gazette Newsletter
👩‍💻 Join the BFW Listener Community
🌍 Join the History Explorers Club

TAKE THE QUIZ
🧭 Discover How You Explore History (under 2 minutes)
👉 https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/quiz

LISTEN 🎧
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CONNECT
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SAY THANKS
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*Book links are affiliate links. Every purchase supports the podcast.